CARMA’s First 48 Hours

The numbers are just fantastic: 150,000 visitors from 187 countries in CARMA’s first two days. Just as important are the hundreds of comments and emails we’ve received with congratulations, suggestions, and questions. Thank you. We will begin sifting through them next week. In the mean time, continue spreading the word. There’s so much more to be done — and you’re at the heart of it.

At some point in the future data centers will start reporting the carbon emissions for their data centers. I know of some which have started to track the carbon emissions internally, preparing for the day their PR teams tell them they want to or need to publish carbon emissions for data centers.

After a few more days carma.org published a further summary including their press coverage.

By mid-day on Thursday CARMA was among the top stories on both the BBC Online and CNN.com…and our server was straining to keep up with the load, despite having been beefed up in advance of the launch.

Coverage ranged from the prestigious science magazine Nature to the liberal blog Daily Kos. Juliet Eilperin, reporting in the Washington Post, was among the first reporters to seek comment from utility companies identified in CARMA as major sources of CO2 pollution, including Southern Co., one of the biggest CO2 polluters in the United States, and the sixth biggest source of CO2 emissions in the world. Strikingly, the companies did not dispute CARMA’s findings.

Friction — special interests, corruption, and social and political Inertia — prevent the necessary adjustments, that is, stop the plates from sliding past one another. Information, injected in the right way and at the right time can be like a lubricant that enables the plates to suddenly slip. That happened this week: it’s reasonable to assume every CEO of every power company on Earth now knows just how much CO2 pollution his firm is discharging, and how this compares with his competitors. With this knowledge, the Earth moved. In the weeks ahead, power company investors, creditors, insurers, board members and customers will have the same information.